there is a soap guy rick knicely, I think his web site is linked on utahbiodieselsupply he has instrctions in his book on making different colored soaps. To make bar soap you will have to add some type of fat back, we used some coconut oil and something else from one of his receipes and made lots of bar soap. Sold as uncle bobs olde fashioned soap for a couple of years in Missouri

2006 Duramax, B100 200k Acadiana BiodieselUS Army RetiredHe that can have Patience, can have what he will - Benjamin Franklin

Let's start at the beginning. Glycerine is a naturally occurring product in the soap making process. In our case that glycerine is taken from a used cooking oil, and is therefore dark.

You can get glycerin that is clear but that is stuff that has been removed from the soap making process and acid treated. You can also get a light coloured soap by using chemicals and synthetics, which is the way Rick does it. When you see soap that has swirls ect in it it is because it has been loaded with chemical agents to make it do that.

Natural soap, unless directly from animal fat, is brown in colour. That is just the fact. Animal fat, like rendered pig fat, will give a harder than nails whiter than snow bar that will lather big time. This is why I use organic rendered pig fat as a binding agent in my bar soaps.They come out brown, but lather exceptionally well and I use absolutely NONE of the health damaging chemicals and synthetics that some others do.

If you want a WalMart bar I won't help you do it, although I have seen that the reasoning for such things is that it is more "appealing to the eye and more commercially viable". I don't compete with WalMart, I have built my own clientele of people who appreciate my soaps for being what thy are, natural and free of health damaging ingredients.

Even Pears glycerin soap, which is somewhat transparent, does not contain all that much of a percentage of glycerin as our soaps do. And ours last in the shower whereas commercial glycerine soaps have the reputation of melting away quickly.

You have to chose your market and what you want in the quality of the product you produce. A well known poster to this site once confirmed what his wife thought of our soap, calling it "poop soap". This same person was all awash (!) in the commercial grade stuff filled with chems and phony ingredients though. It all depends on what kind of standard you set, both for yourself and those who will use your product.

2x I just used the old brown poop color stuff and had to give some away to get them to use it. Once your wife uses it on her face or hands she will sell most of it for you. Nurses and folks that have to wash their hands many times during the day with harsh chemicals and bacterial wash will love this soap, they will overlook the color when they see how it restores that "old" leather they have been working with. BTW, clean your saddles with it and see how it restores old leather for real.

2006 Duramax, B100 200k Acadiana BiodieselUS Army RetiredHe that can have Patience, can have what he will - Benjamin Franklin

You can get rick knicely's book from utah or nebraskabiopro for 20 bucks, it has quite a bit of useful info on how to make batches that dont have to cure, etc. He also is a great guy to email about questions and his basic receipe for hardening soap included using stearic acid, which he goes on to explain the pro's and con's. I tried both ways, found the stearic acid receipe reasonable considering the amount of chemicals I come in contact with each day and enjoyed the soap with a rosy fragerance or lemon zeel fragerance. Good Luck, I would send you a bar if I had any but just moved and have some glycerin but havent started making soap yet. Also I think you can go to ricks website and buy a couple of bars from him.

2006 Duramax, B100 200k Acadiana BiodieselUS Army RetiredHe that can have Patience, can have what he will - Benjamin Franklin

I believe the brownish color of the glycerol byproduct can be removed through distillation.

Since glycerin has a boiling point that is in the range of several hundred(s) degree's, this is not practical for a backyard do-it-yourself project.

Short of that, I think Titanium Dioxide (kind of bad for your health) will lighten its color and make it white-r but you didn't hear that from me because Legal Eagle would bash my head in for telling you...

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I believe the brownish color of the glycerol byproduct can be removed through distillation.

Nope. All natural soap made with a vegetable base is brown. If you want white use rendered pig fat; white as snow and hard as nails. The colour of the glycerin is actually a very deep amber reflecting it's high glycerine content. Glycerine is a naturally occurring substance in all natural soaps, it is simply part of the process. Commercial interests remove the glycerine in order to put it in their creams and lotions you will need when their full-of-chemicals-and-synthetics junk soap dries out your skin.

Titanium Dioxide is a chemical bleaching agent whose inhaled powder can cause cancer. TD is also known under the name of Mica and a few others. It's soap making great fun for the whole family, especially young children (<- high level of sarcasm).

If you have no qualms about exposing yourself to harmful chemicals (like others have told me) then why not just go to your local pharmacy or WalMart and load up? You do not have to bastardize a perfectly good product just 'cause you personally don't care.

I've been chided with the seemingly reasonable idea that people should be allowed to chose for themselves about personal hygiene products. And on the surface this is a most reasonable approach; the thing is though that those making those claims are not educating people about the potential health hazards of the junk ingredients they use so that people can then make an EDUCATED choice; they just put it out there and say nothing except when I step in an expose the junk stuff (of course) screaming how unjust it is to insist that people be properly educated about junk ingredients. The people who use the soap I make have made sure it doesn't contain any of the nefarious junk commercial (or "commercial grade") soaps do. They just don't want it.

Glycerin, glycerol, glycerine, is a clear, colorless, odorless viscous liquid in pure form. C3H8O3,Any color is an impurity. Wvo is degrated as it was heated for the purpose of cooking, mixed with all manner of vegetable, animal, minerals and additives (NaCL,MSG, etc). Much of this is in solution with the glycerine byproduct of biodiesel manufacture, therefore brown, amber, tan. Only by distillation or other chemical process can you purify glycerine. If it is not colorless, you have more than glycerine. It may only be parts per billion, but it is not pure by definition.

I believe the brownish color of the glycerol byproduct can be removed through distillation.

Nope. All natural soap made with a vegetable base is brown. If you want white use rendered pig fat; white as snow and hard as nails. The colour of the glycerin is actually a very deep amber reflecting it's high glycerine content. Glycerine is a naturally occurring substance in all natural soaps, it is simply part of the process. Commercial interests remove the glycerine in order to put it in their creams and lotions you will need when their full-of-chemicals-and-synthetics junk soap dries out your skin.

Not sure where you get that information from but it is innaccurate. Murphy is correct that the brownish color can be removed by distillation and as mentioned in a recent post, pure glycerine is a colorless liquid not a "deep amber". The amber is likely to be from color compounds/impurities which are removed in the distillation process.

In order to get that clear glycerine from a solution of glycerin by product it must be acid treated. You cannot find natural glycerine on it's own, it has always been extracted from an animal or vegetable base.

And the information about vegetable and animal based soaps is accurate. If you find it in any other colour than that stated it has been modified using a chemical process. Natural vegetable based soap will NEVER be anything but brown.

The world's first bar soap, still made today, is from Aleppo Syria when it was part of the Babylonian empire. It was originally made using animal tallow but when the Romans showed up they started using olive oil and then mixed in laurel (sweet basil) oil, which gave the soap a greenish colour until it cured and then, as today, it turns brown. The recipe hasn't changed in a couple thousand years; but has been copied by the French (and others) in their Marseille Soap , made of 100% olive oil and cold processed.

Even this vegetable oil based soap is brown, maybe not AS brown as some others but brown nevertheless.

Ours is an even deeper colour due to it being a concentrated version of it's mother oil, once the esters part (biodiesel) has been removed.

When I say acid treatment I am assuming we are all talking about the same thing, the by product of the biodiesel production. You CAN get pure glycerine another way; when making soap in the traditional way (can't vouch for the modernist, chemical laden synthetic stuff though) and it is liquid soap the method is simple on the surface;you add salt, lots of salt to the soap. This will cause the soap to curdle and then you remove the soap curdles and what you are left with is glycerine, salt and any other impurities that the original soap contained. You then have to distill the glycerine to remove these impurities and salt and the end result is pure glycerine. Only thing is that distilling glycerine is not as simple as it sounds and can be quite dangerous if you do not know what you are doing, which is why the mainstay is still acid treating as a method of separating glycerine from it's soap base.

Glycerine is a by product of saponification, there is no other way to get it; it either comes from animal tallow or vegetable oils that are being turned into soap.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Legal Eagle, September 01, 2012 10:05 AM

So back to the original question. Can you make transparent soap and or add color to our biodiesel glycerin soaps.

The answer is yes.

There are several ways to get there. And yes Titanium Dioxide and Micas are one way of doing this. To clarify these are harmful if you inhale them, just as NaOH, KOH and methanol are. I don't inhale Titanium Dioxide or any other chemical.

That being one way here are some other ideas on color. Since our soaps are brown "out of the box" deep colors work well. Dark purple, Dark Red, Dark Green etc. One trick I have had success with is using crayons with deep colors. The wax in the crayons also helps to harden the soap.

Another thing that helps is adding other ingredients. Lard, Tallow, Coconut Oil and Palm Kernel oil all work well to lighten the soap just enough to accept coloration. The main benefit is that these ingredients also add hardness and some add lather to your soap. Fatty acids such as steric acid, palmitic acid, lauric acid and myristic acid also help. These fatty acids are the fatty acids that are in the Lard, Tallow, Coconut Oil and Palm Kernel oils. These fatty acids can be used in addition to the whole oils mentioned. They work a bit better than the whole oils in some cases because they do not add any additional glycerin -- our soaps are 30% - 60% glycerin already.

Transparency is obtained by adding extra solvent to the soap. When I say solvent I am not talking about paint thinner or any dangerous chemical. The solvents that I like to use to add transparency to bar soaps are water, glycerin and ethanol. These also dilute your soap and the more diluted our soap gets the more it shifts from brown to gold. The real trick is having enough hardening ingredients to make up for the excess solvent used to get the transparency.

You can absolutely make hard soap from the KOH BDG. This is because there are saponifiable ingredients left in the KOH BDG that become NaOH based soaps. Just obtain the SAP value for your KOH soap and use NaOH to saponify. You will need to add hardening ingredients to get a nice firm bar. Any of those mentioned above will help out. Another trick is to slightly acidify the BDG turning some of the KOH soaps to fatty acids. This will increase your SAP value but then you can shift the soap balance towards NaOH. I use Hydrochloric acid as to not add any sulfates or phosphates to the soap like using sulfuric acid or phosphoric acid will do.

A note about acidifying your BDG. If you take it too far you will end up with a "glycerin brine" solution that will separate from the soap, a brine solution is one commercial way to separate the glycerin from the true soap. This glycerin can be distilled into pure glycerin leaving the salts behind, but that takes very high temperatures and vacuum.

Another helpful tool is your glycerin ratio, this will tell you how much soap and how much glycerin you BDG has. It can help you determine how much acidification is needed for KOH BDG and will also help you determine how much hardening ingredients you will need to make a more solid bar of soap.

Another Hardening hint. Use Olive oil. The main fatty acid in olive oil is oleic acid. The soaps made with olive oil or oleic acid are soft shortly after saponification but after 6-8 weeks become hard as a rock. Castile soap is a good example.

Another transparency trick is castor oil. And it adds some great lather! Because the soaps from caster oil are a bit soft in nature you will have to use more hardening ingredients. Castor oil works to add transparency because it acts as a solvent as well as becoming soap.

yes you can, 1.- put some acid ( i use muriatic HCl) in you BDG mixing it until you get a PH from 3 to 1That will separate in 3 phases, on the top, Free Fatty Acids (FFA), in the middle acid water mixed with glycerin, in the bottom salts2.-remove the FFA, they will float3.- filter the acid water for removing salts4.- neutralize the acid water ( i use NaOH mix in water) you must hit Ph75.- again you can se salts , remove them6.- boil until you have no water and remove salts

7.- that will give you a 90 to 95% pure glycerinit will be color like maple syrup , for clarification, i tried a lot of things, close but no cigar

the only that helps a lot its adding a lot off methanol the putting activated charcoal and filter